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By all accounts, yesterday was a big and important day for the tech and online marketing industries. Hundreds of websites protested the SOPA & PIPA bills that are currently moving through the U.S. Congress by either going completely dark for the day or — as we did here on Marketing Land and our sister site, Search Engine Land — blackening a portion of our site and adding anti-SOPA/PIPA messaging to their home pages.

Did it work?

Well, the two bills are not dead, but they’re certainly damaged. By Wednesday night, the Washington Post says that at least four co-sponsors dropped support of PIPA, the Senate version of the bill. The House version, SOPA, also lost prominent support after yesterday’s web protests — protests that extended offline to include hundreds of phone calls to Congress.

How big was yesterday’s anti-SOPA/PIPA movement online? Here are the numbers.

Wikipedia

Wikipedia was the most prominent website to go completely black yesterday. Their recap of what happened is as follows:

More than 162 million users saw Wikipedia’s blackout page.

More than eight million used the page to look up their representatives’ contact information.

More than 12,000 people commented on the Wikimedia Foundation’s blog post about the blackout.

Google’s Facebook post about the petition has more than 4,600 likes right now, along with 1,100+ shares and more than 300 comments.

Google also promised to slow its web crawlers so as to not cause SEO/visibility harm to the hundreds/thousands of websites that went black in protest. And it followed through on that promise.

Matthew Prince, the CEO of Cloudflare — a company that acts as a proxy for hundreds of thousands of websites and sees more than 25 billion page views through its network every month, tells us that Google crawler traffic was down 60% on Wednesday compared to the prior Wednesday. Here are Cloudflare’s numbers on crawler activity yesterday:

Klout has also shared a list of what it considers to be the most influential SOPA-related Twitter users, with a look at how often they were retweeted — plus, which tweets were shared the most.

Flickr

Though Yahoo didn’t directly join in any SOPA/PIPA protest or awareness activity, its Flickr photo community did. Flickr users were able to blacken any photographs on the site (photo owners could opt-out) and given the option to tweet about the photo that they’d just darkened.

Earlier today, Flickr announced that more than 323,000 photos were darkened yesterday.

Final numbers from yesterday’s PIPA/SOPA blackout: 323,445 darkened photos / 2,117,937 views of dark photos. Thanks to all who participated!

Reddit, WordPress & Craigslist

As of this moment, we haven’t seen any numbers directly from Reddit, Craigslist and WordPress about the impact of their protests. But the folks at Covario have done some digging of their own, using a variety of third-party data sources, and come up with these numbers:

By going dark for the day, Reddit users didn’t spend more than 18 million minutes on the site.

WordPress’ protest could’ve been seen by about 35 million bloggers. [Ed. note: WordPress went black on its .org site and blackened content on its .com site.]

Craigslist, which went dark for the day, might have lost about $825,000 in revenue by missing out on 33,000 new job postings per day at $25 each.

Washington, DC

I touched on the impact in Washington, DC, earlier in this article — co-sponsors dropping support of the two bills, etc. OpenCongress has more on that — like 35 Senators now opposing PIPA, up from only five a week ago. OpenCongress also says it set a record with 256,000 visits yesterday.

All in all, it looks like the anti-SOPA/PIPA efforts online this week were an enormous success.

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About The Author

Matt McGee is the Editor-In-Chief of Search Engine Land. His news career includes time spent in TV, radio, and print journalism. After leaving traditional media in the mid-1990s, he began developing and marketing websites and continued to provide consulting services for more than 15 years. His SEO and social media clients ranged from mom-and-pop small businesses to one of the Top 5 online retailers. Matt is a longtime speaker at marketing events around the U.S., including keynote and panelist roles. He can be found on Twitter at @MattMcGee and/or on Google Plus. You can read Matt's disclosures on his personal blog. You can reach Matt via email using our Contact page.